“Christ! I didn’t hear you come in.” He padded toward me making wet footprints, and I thought he looked just like a dog, all brown-eyed and hopeful.
“We have to talk,” I said.
“Okay, okay, let me put on a robe and my glasses. Did you get my message?”
“Uh-uh.” He looked perplexed and then went to the bedroom while I steeled myself. When he came back I said, “I think we should try living separately for a while.”
He looked absolutely floored and I felt cruel but continued. “I’ve been thinking things over. I’m not happy, Carey. I don’t know whether it’s us or what. I think I need some time away so I can think things out.”
“Sally. Dear.” That was his only endearment, and a rare one. He sat down on the sofa beside me. “Being alone is going to let you think more clearly? I don’t understand that.”
“Well, it’s true. Maybe not for you, but for me.”
“We can see a marriage counselor. There’s no need for hasty decisions.”
“We can see a counselor, but I still want my own apartment. I just need to be by myself for a while. Is that so much to ask?”
“Look, I told you anytime you want, you can just quit working. Don’t you want a baby? I thought you wanted a baby.”
He sounded simpleminded. I gripped my hands into fists. “I’m not talking about ending anything, Carey. I’m talking about a break.”
My husband looked down at the floor, noticed that his wing tips were out of alignment, straightened them, and then said, “Okay, Sally. If that’s what you really want. We’ll try it. How long were you thinking of?”
“Six months.”
He folded his arms across his chest. “Do you think you can find a place to rent for six months?”
“I don’t mind breaking a lease.”
“You’re sure of this now?”
“Yes.”
“All right.” He was being so reasonable I wanted to scream, pick up one of his damn shoes, hurl it across the room, and shatter a horse lamp. But I didn’t. We just sat there in silence for a while and then he leaned over and said softly: “Sally.” My stomach clenched.
“How can you want that now?” I asked him. “How can you even think it?”
“If we’re going to be living apart—”
“No,” I said. And it was as simple as that.
I was happy, at first. I went out with people in my office, who said, “God, Sally, we always thought of you as such the perfect little wife, and now here you are acting crazy like the rest of us.” I played pool, started wearing my skirts a little shorter, but not too short. I was not the one with great legs. Ma called every night. Carey had been talking to her, he was such a responsible, generous husband, he loved me so much. After I hung up with Ma, I’d call Fran. “I feel so free,” I said.
“Then stay free.”
“I want rapture.”
“Then hold out for it, honey.”
My husband did not let me alone. He sent me roses, took me out to every new restaurant that opened in town. It was the courtship we’d never had. I gained weight, from those dinners and from all the beer I was drinking on pool nights. Carey said I looked terrific. “Could you be, maybe you’re. . .?” he asked me once.
“I’m not pregnant,” I told him.
Six months turned into eight. Neither of us had done anything about counseling.
“I want you home,” he said. We were at a Tex-Mex place in Chelsea, where the food was so beautiful, blue corn everything and every color pepper you could think of, that it seemed a pity to eat it.
“I can’t,” I said. “I need more time.”
“I need a wife,” he said. Nothing more. I should have known. I didn’t hear from him for three weeks and then he called me at the office. “My lawyer will be in touch with you.”
“Why?” Panic did not begin to describe how I felt.
“I want a divorce.”
“Have you met someone?”
“I want a divorce,” he repeated.
I thought: so it begins, you asked for it, Sally, here it is.
It never occurred to me to try to win him back.
When I told this to Uncle Richard, naturally I left out the sex parts. He kept saying, “Mmmhmm, mmmhmm” until I realized that he hadn’t said it for a while. When I looked over he was fast asleep, his mouth open, the big belly rising and falling gently, one hand dangling childishly over the chaise as if he had dropped off in the middle of reaching for his glass of iced tea.
20
The calamondin was ripe, practically falling off the bush, and the day after my tete-a-tete with Uncle Richard I decided to pick them. In terms of worms and insects they had fared better than the grapefruit—every third one or so was salvageable. Aunty Mabel saw what I was doing and came out to help. It was around three o’clock, nearly one hundred degrees, and I was wearing Schuyler’s T-shirt and shorts, now paint stained, my hair tucked up into a bun under the Derby Lane hat. As we were stooped there, working, we heard a car zoom by the house, stop, back up, and then the spray of gravel as it slid into our driveway.
“Plumber not supposed to come till tomorrow,” Aunty Mabel said.
I didn’t recognize the car, an old teal Oldsmobile, but why would I, I’d never seen Mel out of the hospital, I didn’t know what he drove.
“Christ! You never called, you said you would call.”
“Good to see you, too, honey.” He was slightly smaller than I’d remembered, leaner, and as he removed his Ray-Bans I saw faint laugh lines that surprised me. The gold stud in his left lobe had been replaced by a pale sapphire that seemed especially picked for the Florida light. So neat, everything about him just so. A sight for sore eyes. He leaned to kiss me on the cheek and then he held out his hand to my aunt, who had come up, frowning, fruit gathered in the corner of her apron.
“Mel LaMonte. Mrs. Ding, it’s a pleasure to meet you. Sally’s told me so much about you.”
My aunt fussed with her hair a little, pushed her own sunglasses up on top of her head, shook his hand. How could I have forgotten the pure charm of him, those manners that would have put any of the snide New York boys I’d hankered after as a teenager to shame.
I said, “We’d invite you in, but my uncle’s resting.”
“No problem. We’ll go to the beach. Get your bathing suit.”
I turned back to my aunt, who flapped her hand at us. “Qu,qu, qu.”
“But what about the fruit?”
“One more teeny-weeny bush, big deal, I can do.”
He’d driven two days, stopping the night in North Carolina where a friend of his lived. He had a billion friends, something else I’d forgotten about him.
“How’d you know I was still here?” I asked him. “Why’d you take the chance and come all the way down without calling?”
“You’re never going to believe this, but I ran into your sister.”
“Marty?”
“On Chapel Street, in New Haven. She’s kind of hard to miss, with that sling and everything. She was awfully friendly.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I told you, honey, with her it’s so much surface. With you, on the other hand—”
“Make a left here.”
“Where are we going?”
“My favorite beach. But we kind of have to sneak in.”
“I love it.”
Mel was a graceful driver, maneuvering the tanklike Olds as adroitly as if it were my aunt and uncle’s Toyota. This was his dad’s car, he explained, he was sorry it didn’t have air-conditioning. I didn’t care. It was romantic with the windows rolled all the way down. He had his arm along the back of the seat, right behind my neck, and I could feel all the little hairs there rise in response. I felt like the kind of teenager I’d always wanted to be, the kind that Marty and Darcy had been. The radio was on, a song that was popular that spring, about a girl being the captain of a guy’s heart. Mel hummed along and then he laughed. “I think I’ve heard this idiotic tune two thousand times since I left Connecticut. Why so quiet, Sal?”